V4: Covers (front and back) + details about color themes (Patreon)

So... V3 is officially done! Which means V4 has entered official development at last! This doesn't even feel REAL to me, in all honesty, but it's very real. Now that we've entered official development, I'm going to reveal the first few pieces of official content for the volume and talk a little bit about the design process behind them -- so let's dive in!

Here are the official front and back covers for the volume (which have the possibility of getting edits later, we're still a ways out from publishing!):

Exciting, huh? It's exciting for me too!

The process behind designing the visual composition for the front and back covers is something I call "color themes" for this comic. What is a color theme, you ask? Well, let me explain!

Here are the covers of volumes 1-3 combined with pages from the final scenes of each volume. Notice anything about them?

The final scene is meant to mirror the visuals of the cover page in color palette. It's a stylistic choice that tends to have symbolic value in terms of visual storytelling. For volume 4, I wanted to plan out the color theme strategically, so I messed around with some color palettes.

These are some of the color palettes I tested out when considering the volume's color theme. Each of them have a bit of a visual meaning, can you figure out what they are?

The bottom right one is the one I eventually decided to go with, because I felt like it suited the final scene of the volume the best.

Here's a visual test I drew up when trying to decide the look of the cover:

As you can see, the final product was pretty close to this!

The fact volume 4 has officially entered development brings me more joy than I know how to put into words <333 I really hope you guys are as excited as I am to see this weird, wacky, sort of infamous volume come to life!